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Borland has announced that it plans to divest in it’s line of Integrated Development Environments (IDE) to focus on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). As part of the announcement, Borland made public its agreement to purchase Segue Software, a producer of software quality testing tools.

Borland has not named any potential buyers though it does hope that they will develop into its own business so that it can continue to attract investments. It is likely that Delphi, which is a cash cow and has a strong and loyal following, will be bought up. However the outlook for JBuilder looks less certain as it suffers from competitive pressures from free and open source alternatives.

In moving forward, CEO Tod Nielsen has stated that the company will focus on process rather then technology. Part of the strategy is to develop partnerships with large integrators such as EDS and Accenture. It will also add support for Business Process Modeling Notation into Together Control Center de-emphasizing the developer oriented aspects of the tool. It is also expected to add project portfolio management capabilities.

Does this move spell the end of the commercial market for Java IDE and other tools?

[blockquote]People are not going to pay big money for JBuilder when quality tools like Eclipse and NetBeans are available for free. It would be interesting to see how Microsoft tools fare in this environment.[/blockquote]

That's part of the reason, but a bigger reason is the coming end of the win32 era and the fact that Microsoft's express editions of their IDEs are free.

My first paying job was working with DOS Turbo C++, but I never got a chance to work with Delphi - which I hear was an awesome environment.

It would be interesting to see how Microsoft tools fare in this environment.

I may be able to shed some light on this. I was getting bored with J2EE and wanted to create somE programs for the desktop that could talk to other devices aka system programming stuff.

I first downloaded Microsoft's VC++ Experess Edition . It was free and a great learning tool . However, it did not ship with ATL libraries. And Getting this to work with Platform SDK was painful. And I stll can'T compile any DirectShow examples. So this was a great beginner tooL but you really couldn't go very far with this.

The next option could have been the MingW tool-kit. Clearly meant for the masochist programmers.

I never considered Delhi as I do not think it is a tool for System programming.

That brings me to Visual Studio Standard edition. This is probably the only tool worth using on Microsoft Platform. It has support for C#, J# and VC++ -- clearly worth the money. And apparently works seamlessly with all of Micsrosofts's SDKs.

So Microsoft has nothing to worry about for Visual Studio: the price to performance ratio is simply very good.

Does this move spell the end of the commercial market for Java IDE and other tools?

No. It spells the end for the Borland IDE business model, which, as far as I can tell, consisted of releasing a new version every 12 minutes and pestering customers to pay a large upgrade fee. This worked well for a time as Borland could get their products entrenched into large organisations but as more and more companies see the merits of dividing their resources into small, agile project teams and as developers change jobs and experience of various tools moves around the industry, tools like JBuilder will begin to lose their share of the market. Someone on the team always knows of a better option and is keen to impress their managers by suggesting a better (or cheaper) product.

I dont think that the IntelliJ people have anything to worry about. They have differentiated themselves by producing a product that is (arguably) sleaker and more user-friendly and base their business on providing a superior product rather than vendor lock-in.

A quick skim of the recent IDEA 5.1 thread here demonstrates that their are plenty of people who are willing to pay for an IDEA license despite the free alternatives.

I dont think that the IntelliJ people have anything to worry about. They have differentiated themselves by producing a product that is (arguably) sleaker and more user-friendly and base their business on providing a superior product rather than vendor lock-in. A quick skim of the recent IDEA 5.1 thread here demonstrates that their are plenty of people who are willing to pay for an IDEA license despite the free alternatives.

Agree, actualy I have my picks with IDEA, but they have so many features that are not even closely replicated in other IDEAs, that the small issues I have, do not have their merits. IDEA is truly the smartest IDE out there, forget Java, I don't know any other IDE in history that was this good.

I dont think that the IntelliJ people have anything to worry about. They have differentiated themselves by producing a product that is (arguably) sleaker and more user-friendly and base their business on providing a superior product rather than vendor lock-in. A quick skim of the recent IDEA 5.1 thread here demonstrates that their are plenty of people who are willing to pay for an IDEA license despite the free alternatives.

Agree, actualy I have my picks with IDEA, but they have so many features that are not even closely replicated in other IDEAs, that the small issues I have, do not have their merits. IDEA is truly the smartest IDE out there, forget Java, I don't know any other IDE in history that was this good.Ilya

I disagree. I would seem to think that they (along with any vendor who's primary product is a commercial Java IDE), have plenty to worry about. The big players have decided to give away quality tools for free to help push servers, etc. This is good news for develpers but bad news for competition. You have to wonder at the pace Netbeans is moving, how long it will take them to implement all those 'many features that are not even closely replicated...'.

I would have to think these commercial IDE vendors will try to diversify their product lines (and downplay the mark of 'Java IDE vendor') very quickly if they've not already begun to do so.

I disagree. I would seem to think that they (along with any vendor who's primary product is a commercial Java IDE), have plenty to worry about. The big players have decided to give away quality tools for free to help push servers, etc. This is good news for develpers but bad news for competition. You have to wonder at the pace Netbeans is moving, how long it will take them to implement all those 'many features that are not even closely replicated...'. I would have to think these commercial IDE vendors will try to diversify their product lines (and downplay the mark of 'Java IDE vendor') very quickly if they've not already begun to do so.

Well, IDEA's innovative features, some are amazing. The way they even do classpath scanning for intelligent code suggestions/building, is different than how Eclipse and/or Netbeans do it. I'm amazed with new IDEA features each day. Not that it won't ever be put at stake by Netbeans, but I don't see that happening in the next year or so.

Does this move spell the end of the commercial market for Java IDE and other tools?

No. It spells the end for the Borland IDE business model, which, as far as I can tell, consisted of releasing a new version every 12 minutes and pestering customers to pay a large upgrade fee. This worked well for a time as Borland could get their products entrenched into large organisations but as more and more companies see the merits of dividing their resources into small, agile project teams and as developers change jobs and experience of various tools moves around the industry, tools like JBuilder will begin to lose their share of the market. Someone on the team always knows of a better option and is keen to impress their managers by suggesting a better (or cheaper) product.I dont think that the IntelliJ people have anything to worry about. They have differentiated themselves by producing a product that is (arguably) sleaker and more user-friendly and base their business on providing a superior product rather than vendor lock-in. A quick skim of the recent IDEA 5.1 thread here demonstrates that their are plenty of people who are willing to pay for an IDEA license despite the free alternatives.

+1

There is no freaking way in the world I am going up IntelliJ for an ugly sucker like Eclipse. I never laster longer than a week on Eclipse. I's rather use emacs than that piece of crap, excuse my "french".

I am not a big fan of polls, but the fact that IntelliJ won all major Java polls as the best IDE, during 2005, still may mean something.

IntelliJ has very successfully differentiated their product from the competition, set a reasonable price (as opposed to absolutely unjustified thousands that JBuilder costs) and generally, are much nicer people than Borland :)

If IntelliJ keeps up the good work, they do not have much to worry about.

I don't think it's the end of Borland. Borland has a brand/history, and they will refactor it to provide project management, architecture tools, team colloboration, etc...Ilya

If you believe that Borland is just a brand name. But it was a culture, a bold team of first-grade developers. Two teams, actually. Now, while the Delphi team is mostly still there, the JBuilder team is virtually gone. And the Optimizeit team is gone. Do you know who replaces them? Pick a decent-looking QA Engineer, tell him he is a developer now, give him 7 million lines of code (approximate figure; all similarities to the real numbers are coincidental), and give him a deadline. That's what was happening there lately.

Last summer we had a JBuilder farewell party. People were proud that they were there, that such a great product was created and grew to maturity. I am proud that I spend 6 years working with that team. And it is all in the past. What can we do? Move on.

Guess thats the end of Borland. Companies don't tend to survive this sort of radical restructure.

In that case, should they not have died when they gave up Paradox, Quattro Pro and Sidekick? Focusing on their lifecycle tools like StarTeam and CaliberRM is a wise decision; the question is whether Together will survive even if JBuilder does not, or if people will go to MyEclipse's $50/year tools instead.

Guess thats the end of Borland. Companies don't tend to survive this sort of radical restructure.

In that case, should they not have died when they gave up Paradox, Quattro Pro and Sidekick? Focusing on their lifecycle tools like StarTeam and CaliberRM is a wise decision;

Borland has its highs and lows. It has made a few mistakes (who deosn't?). It should not buy dBase. Its Quattro involved in a long legal battle with Lotus which gave Borland hard time. Its C++ product was better engineered than Microsoft's, but lost in the market. It was late in Java IDE market, but regained the leadership. Borland will be up again.

I will surely miss JBuilder, since I do not know of any other tool that allows for switching from platform to platform on the way, converting the XML deployment descriptors on the way.

Wow. Never before heard of a user that would be happy with JBuilder's deployment descriptors mess. Have you figured out what do to with "Large icon" and "Small icon"? I've been asking JBuilder developers (can give you names) for years to explain the meaning of those, and why I have to switch to raw XML every time I needed something real to be done - all I heard was "we inherited it".

Wow. Never before heard of a user that would be happy with JBuilder's deployment descriptors mess. Have you figured out what do to with "Large icon" and "Small icon"? I've been asking JBuilder developers (can give you names) for years to explain the meaning of those, and why I have to switch to raw XML every time I needed something real to be done - all I heard was "we inherited it".

All I remember about JBuilder was that it had a pretty mean space leak. If you didn't restart it down every once in a while it would use a good hunk of heap.

Of course, I though 100MB was a big heap back then. Now I'm forced to use Tibco products which need 600MB to a 1.5 GB just to run.

Wow. Never before heard of a user that would be happy with JBuilder's deployment descriptors mess. Have you figured out what do to with "Large icon" and "Small icon"? I've been asking JBuilder developers (can give you names) for years to explain the meaning of those, and why I have to switch to raw XML every time I needed something real to be done - all I heard was "we inherited it".

Dont know what to do with Large icon? then read the J2EE idiot book. Clearly u dont know what you are talking about. No anwser means that no developer wants to anwser this naive question.

Does this move spell the end of the commercial market for Java IDE and other tools?

No. IDE (development tools) is different from other tools. There are Eclipse and Netbeans, with same functionality, free and open source. And they are supported by big companies. It is difficult to compete in this sector.

"Free" will not go for ever. A couple days ago, every thing on the net was free. I put an ad on Yahoo to sell my car. At that time Yahoo was free. Ebay was free. But now almost all of them charge some money. As long as there is a need, some one will pay for it. Of course, the price must be right. JBuilder is very good, but its price is too high.

Borland has its highs and lows. Its first product was Turbo-Pascal, followed by Turbo-C. They was sooo good...

Adieu JBuilder!I've know you since you were 7!! Version 7 that is :)Well, I guess Borland is the first high profile casualty of Open Source IDEs and this clearly shows that a company needs to innovate to remain competitive. Many praised IDEA for this but the truth is the same fate is reserved for IDEA when eclipse or netbeans will gain parity in terms of feature! This will happen and IDEA will lose out to the open source IDEs...It's pure economics! Sun understood this when they decided to open source their product stack. They didn't do it because they "embrace" the OS philosophy, they did it out of necessity. Borland should have sold off its IDE business 2 years ago in my mind. They were late in the IDE business and they are late in their new business. By focusing on process, they are clearly taking a path already cleared by IBM, the 800 pound gorilla that added Rational to their suite of software years ago. Good luck Borland.

I disagree with all the "IntelliJ has nothing to worry about" comments.

As Warren Buffett says, you need a "durable competitive advantage" in order to thrive in any industry.

in a world where competing (and competent) IDEs are free, Having an innovative IDE does not qualify as a durable competitive advantage IMHO .

If I were and IDEA developer, I certainly wouldn't feel like my job was secure. My guess is that the collective heart of IDEA's staff skips a beat each time Eclipse or NetBeans releases a new version. And then they probably settle down after reading the features list -- for now.

As Warren Buffett says, you need a "durable competitive advantage" in order to thrive in any industry.in a world where competing (and competent) IDEs are free, Having an innovative IDE does not qualify as a durable competitive advantage IMHO .

Not true. According to Porter's Five Forces, more differentiated a product is - less threat of substitutes exists. Therefore, having an innovative IDE is a competitive advantage, for sure. To make it "durable" they just need to keep up the unmatched user-friendliness and comfort of IntelliJ.

The most important thing is that IntelliJ needs to make sure their marketing efforts keep delivering the message of being unique. So far, they've done a good job, in that.

Also, you are forgetting that IntelliJ is also free for open-source projects. A huge audience with a very strong word-of-mouth marketing potential.

No such case exists when a product "should not worry" about competition, but I think with the quality of product Jetbrains has and with the smart marketing that they have done, so far - they should not be too concerned.

I, personally, payed the 500$ for IntelliJ without any hesitation, and after having experience with both Eclipse and Netbeans, as well as JBuilder.

I disagree with all the "IntelliJ has nothing to worry about" comments.As Warren Buffett says, you need a "durable competitive advantage" in order to thrive in any industry.in a world where competing (and competent) IDEs are free, Having an innovative IDE does not qualify as a durable competitive advantage IMHO .If I were and IDEA developer, I certainly wouldn't feel like my job was secure. My guess is that the collective heart of IDEA's staff skips a beat each time Eclipse or NetBeans releases a new version. And then they probably settle down after reading the features list -- for now.

Their "durable competitive advantage" is usability. They understand it. Nothing I've seen from Eclipse says that they've even heard the word. Netbeans may be getting better, but even the Netbeans supporters I've seen questioned think that the code editor is nearly as fluid as the one in IDEA. IDEA just seems to know what you want to do when you want to do it.

I wish Eclipse / Netbeans / Microsoft Word / etc developers would understand: It's not about a features checklist. There's 20% of the features I use 80% of the time. Make them WORK REALLY REALLY WELL. IDEA understands this. The other 20% of stuff in IDEA only works REALLY WELL :-)

I made my first steps in programming after playing around with Basic with Borland's Pascal compiler which I loved very much. For that reason I feel really sorry for Borland and I'm not into Borland bashing. But I never understood why those people at Borland simply never got that they can't provide IDEs that consist of a source code browser and a compile button sticked onto it. People want comfortable IDEs with good code navigation, rich browsers, refactoring, and all that stuff that make their coding life easier and most of all fun. To me it's no wonder that eclipse and IntelliJ are doing that well.

If Microsoft where not the only major IDE vendor for .NET development it would also face the same troubles as Borland as their IDEs as well tend to be neither interactive nor an environment.

Now investing that much money to buy another company rather than using that money to brush up their IDEs to be able to compete again with other vendors really tells me that the management at Borland is not able to realize what the market asks for: "We just make compilers, nothing else. If that stuff doesn't sell anymore then we do something else."

Delphi is a true jewel for WinAPI development, VB always sucked comparing to Delphi. Kylix had a great future, too bad that Linux junkies did not want to pay for dev tool. JBuilder was not that impressive as Delphi, I never cared for JBuilder. RIP.

Personally I won't miss JBuilder, but I learned C programming on Turbo C see years ago. I think Borland is making the right move, free IDE's are taking over and Borland could be out of business. So it's a good idea to sell their software when it is still being used and has customers before they have make them free like Sun Microsystems did.

Borland's management has long been known to be idiots pretending to be gurus. Marketing people dictate them what is in vogue, and what is "expired", and they follow. It was so with, for instance, JBuilder's refactoring functionality that penetrated the product against the will of marketing people - marketing people had no clue what it was, and never heard from their executive customers anything about refactoring.

How come JetBrain prospers, and Borland is in coma? How come the best developers left Borland in anger? Nobody needs the best developers anymore? Google does. But not Borland; what Borland obviously needs is more marketing people. And more managers. I spent 7 years there. The ratio was something like 1.5 manager per one developer. And then they had the famous bozo, Boz Elloy. He said that inventions are made by marketing. And that we all are numbers to him.

Borland is the business equivalent of Terry Schiavo. Breathes, eats, shits, but no brain activity. Zilch.

How come JetBrain prospers, and Borland is in coma? How come the best developers left Borland in anger? Nobody needs the best developers anymore? Google does. But not Borland; what Borland obviously needs is more marketing people. And more managers. I spent 7 years there. The ratio was something like 1.5 manager per one developer. And then they had the famous bozo, Boz Elloy. He said that inventions are made by marketing. And that we all are numbers to him.

Nick's Delphi Blog: "If you go to Borland, you can't swing a dead cat without knocking over 14 Vice-Presidents of Some Global Something or Other. That can't be good for the bottom line. It can be reasonably assumed that the new company won't have such a top-heavy management structure, and one would hope that they'd be lean and mean in that department. Not paying a ton of VP's a ton of money goes a long way towards profitability."Michael Swindell, Director, Windows/.NET Developer Tools: "Becoming an independent company can allow us a pure focus on our Delphi, C++Builder, JBuilder, and Interbase customer needs ... We're like a high performance sports car that's been running on 87 octane... we need Premium 92 octane to really scoot!"

Nick's Delphi Blog: "If you go to Borland, you can't swing a dead cat without knocking over 14 Vice-Presidents of Some Global Something or Other. That can't be good for the bottom line. It can be reasonably assumed that the new company won't have such a top-heavy management structure, and one would hope that they'd be lean and mean in that department. Not paying a ton of VP's a ton of money goes a long way towards profitability

That guy is clearly an idiot. You make a company profitable by laying off all the people who actually do something, outsource it to a company whose interests are in conflict with your's, and give the upper-management a fat bonus. Duh!

On a serious note, any idea what will happen to the software? I used Together for a brief period and I really liked it. Borland was screwing it up from what I could tell. You'd talk to their reps and they'd refuse to admit it was an IDE. "But I'm writing code in it right now!"

I was sorry to hear that JBuilder won't be around much longer. For a while it had a feature set that put it ahead of the competition, and it gave me a productivity edge a few years back over some more experienced peers who considered the use of anything but a plain text editor for java work to be a form of deviance. Who laughed when trying to develop java GUI's ;-)

My management opted for 1 iteration of JBuilder, then on to Intellij because they could not justify the high cost of JBuilder when a bunch of senior developers still favoured basic text editors and had mounted a concerted campaign against JBuilder to management (based in my view on "a priori" criteria rather than an actual evaluation of the JBuilder product). I believe this was because JBuilder allowed less senior developers to be productive, and took away some of the pain of java development at that time.

I hope that Intellij survives the consolidation of the IDE market. Like JBuilder before it, it has features which enhance productivity which IMHO free competitors do not yet match. I do, however, fear for their future. I asked my engineering manager today whether the company would fund an upgrade my 3 year old Intellij in the context of the freely available Eclipse (used by almost all of my colleagues), and an answer was not forthcoming!

Having used both, I will fork out my own money for IDEA, if my upgrade is not sanctioned, as I believe it offers productivity benefits compared with the free competition. Eclipse is excellent, but Intellij is IMHO the best at the moment.

So for all you developers who want to gain an edge, I would say, get Intellij while it remains the best IDE. Secondarily, I would say that competition is important in this domain, as in other domains, and keeps things rolling forward. If Eclipse obtains a monopoly, I wouldn't see that as a positive thing. For a start it might just start to increase in price, and innovation could be stifled.

How come? The news means that the current Borland management decided to kick out dev tools in favor of Together/Starteam/whatever. They want to spin off a new company with good old dev team, but with new investors and hopefully with new management and apparently with a new name. This announcement does not mean that Borland is going to kill their dev tools division right away.

Whatever the outcome, I always loved Delphi as well as previous Turbo products, but I never really cared about JBuilder. I purchased IDEA at my own expense despite that I use it in the office, and I believe that it was totally worth it. I wish JBuilder team came up with better solution for GUI design, by creating some sort of resource definition file (I cannot get why Swing does not have one. Why everything is in the code?). IntelliJ did that. Despite that implementation may be not as brilliant as their refactoring tools, IDEA is still ahead idea-wise :)

You know, when Borland came out with JBuilder, I know that it was the end of Delphi. Why? Borland killed it. Sales people get paid on new license not maintenance. Therefore all of those Borland account reps needed to sell JBuilder and they had to do it at the expence of Delphi. They talked their Delphi customers to buy JBuilder. That lead them to Java and ... well you know the rest.

What we are all talking about here is not IDEs, but rather business models. Borlands move with JBuilder is evidence that the business model of selling software development tools (strictly speaking) is outdated. Sorry IDEA.

What we are all talking about here is not IDEs, but rather business models. Borlands move with JBuilder is evidence that the business model of selling software development tools (strictly speaking) is outdated. Sorry IDEA.

Er ... no.

What it proves, is that charging developers thousands of dollars to fix bugs that should never have been in the product in the first place, is not a sound long-term strategy.

JBuilder once was in the same position that Intellij is today. It was an IDE that had a huge fan following inspite of heavy competition from a lot of other IDE's (remember Visual Cafe, Visual J++,etc). It was because JBuilder was affordable and it concentrated on only one feature, allowing developers to write code efficiently. It had a broader appeal and was the only real java IDE in town and every java developer I knew swore by it. Then it grew bigger and started providing more and more features for fewer and fewer developers. It became more and more expensive and stopped addressing the needs of its most loyal users, the coders. Then Intellij came in and all the disgruntled followers flocked towards an IDE that they wanted JBuilder to be. Eventually the Open Source revolution also provided other alternatives.I hope Intellij learns from this and keeps improving on what it does best, help write code.

What does this mean for the IDE/Modelling hybrid that is Together for Eclipse? I find it a valuble tool and it would be a shame to scrap it. If they wan't to dump JBuilder only as I haven't used it I can't comment on it but Toghether for Eclipse is a real jewl in architecting software and they shouldn't scrap that as a product.

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